Comments to "Week 4: Affect and the Politics of Im(materiality)"

Note: Unfortunately, this program would not let me paste my comments into the regular comment box so I had to create an actual post so here it goes:

A junkie walking through the twilight
I'm on my way home
I left three days ago, but no one seems to know I'm gone
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
Might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went home again

Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
Hang on to your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die
You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
To turn your sick soul inside out
So that the world, so that the world
Can watch you die

Home is where I live inside my white powder dreams
Home was once an empty vacuum that's filled now with my silent screams
Home is where the needle marks
Try to heal my broken heart

-Gil Scott Heron, “Home is Where the Hatred Is”

Pain and fear are interconnected in their affects as objects that trigger these powerful emotions continue circulating in the currents of memory, reinforced by the recurring refrains. Hope serves as an ephemeral soothing emotion, always promising yet never sustained, but temporarily we hold on to it as we dream of the “better tomorrow”. Then reality as we know it sets in. Hope morphs into despair. The promises of hope’s optimism are cruel indeed, as the actual future is never quite as fulfilling as the idea of what that future will be. The “good life” as Berlant describes is often not realized and the affective attachments to the American dream leave the majority of us with an inexplicable emptiness of a dream always deferred.

Conditions of possibility are contingencies dependent on conceivable parameters. As a political project, hopeful promises must at least seem realistic. Blissful ignorance makes the inconceivable more conceivable, as what we do not know will not hurt us. Forecasting the future politically with the myriad of negative possibilities hovering above us breeds the pessimism that is perpetual apathy. Spinoza’s link between hope and possibility is accurate as what we are hopeful for must be in some way achievable. Many have said that Obama’s election in 2008 was the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, a crowning achievement of the American society that finally overcome the horrific past of racial oppression and injustice. The refrains of “We Shall Overcome” were answered as history was made four years ago, an event that made the hopeful promises seem palatable and an actual possibility. Again, reality had to set in for us to realize the “once in a lifetime” event was the “same as it ever was”.

We who realize that four years is not enough time to make all lofty campaign promises true must defer some of our hopeful wishes for the Obama administration. We also realize that the rhetoric in opposition to Obama is peppered with subtle (and not so subtle) refrains of racism and cultural ignorance (“same as it ever was”). To answer part of Bill’ second question political choices are rarely based on rationality it is always the affect that drives the decision, and this decision hinges on identity. The bifurcation of the two party system dictates how most of us vote as we are aligned ideologically by the social factors of race and religious values which certainly is irrational and almost always based on affects. The few who actually engage the political process logically and rationally are usually those who lack many of these affective attachments, which I guess would be the point of us doing this kind of theorizing, to get away from the problematic nature of essentializing.

I can’t help but to notice your pain. It runs deep. Share it with me!

I also agree with Brown and Ahmed’s assertion that the fetishization of pain is not a sound basis for political action. Holding on to pain either for the individual or body politic only reinforces the injury as well as make as spectacle out of an event long past. This “wound fetishism” Ahmed describes serves to reinforce destructive behavior, all wrapped around who you think you are. The junkie returns to his junk as he cannot escape the pain of home, but what his conception of home is was only a moment in time, a time past that he continues to revisit. So it is a good idea not to go back home, because as Gil Scott Heron once sang, “home is where the hatred is”.